


The Kind Ghosts

by dewinter



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Angst, Disfigurement, Gen, Injury, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 07:16:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13049175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dewinter/pseuds/dewinter
Summary: At a wedding reception in 1955, a chance encounter forces two former acquaintances to revisit the past.





	The Kind Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disenchanted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/gifts).



**The Kind Ghosts**

_Word over all, beautiful as the sky!_

_Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;_

_That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world._

Walt Whitman, “Reconciliation”

_1955_

It had been decent of Terrence to invite him, Farrier supposed. But then, Terrence had always been decent.

He’d offered to testify as a character witness back in ’52, when Farrier had been hauled up in front of the magistrate for gross indecency, and though Farrier had refused, for the sake of Terrence’s reputation, he’d appreciated the gesture more than he’d been able to express.

The wedding invitation had been something of a surprise, however. He’d last spoken to Terrence just after his release from the Scrubs, and the intervening two years had passed without a telephone call or a Christmas card.

And yet here he was, feeling brutish in a suit he’d last worn before the war, clutching the stem of a champagne coupe too tightly and scanning the room for ghosts. He’d survived his encounter with Terrence’s new wife, who was small and toothy and smiled so warmly at him that he’d surmised Terrence must have failed to divulge certain aspects of his history.

And now alone and drunk, but not drunk enough. There were four or five of the old crowd there, but their greetings had been vague and stilted; clearly they were all _too_ familiar with his recent disgrace.

Farrier sluiced the rest of his champagne in one, and sauntered back towards the pyramid of glasses. Happiness surged through the room in waves, in the shriek of the bridesmaids’ laughter, and the furious hi-hat, and Terrence’s father-in-law intoning sonorous bon mots beneath it all – and it barely lapped at Farrier. He was beginning a headache – Scotch would have done more to dull it, but there was none on offer. The champagne was reassuringly expensive, at least.

He reached for another glass at the same time as the man next to him. “Oh, excuse me,” he said as their hands collided.

“You’re grand, pal,” the man said, and though his sobriety was beginning to wear off, Farrier felt his throat constrict. It felt like a parachute opening, or like what he remembered that sensation to be. The voice was unmistakable. He looked up.

“Collins?” he said, and the champagne sloshing in him bubbled up and made the word light, and almost inconsequential.

“Christ, Farrier,” Collins said.

Time hadn’t done much for the burns; his face wasn’t in much better shape than it had been the last time they’d seen each other, but the look of shock and guilt was gut-achingly familiar, and too acute to be disguised by scar tissue.

*

_1939_

Five past midnight at the Sphinx, and a waifish lad with kohl around his eyes was leaning towards him and saying something not particularly interesting about how the place had been built on what had once been plague pits. Farrier, half-listening, glanced towards the bar. The clientele had thinned somewhat, enough that he could see, through the haze of cigarette smoke, the cluster of young boys at the far end.

“Hmm,” he said in mild surprise, distractedly enough that the plague pit boy paused.

“What?”

Farrier nodded towards the bar. “Just seen someone I know.”

The plague pit boy – whose name might have been Edwin, if Farrier had taken time to think of it – threw a cursory look towards where Farrier indicated. “Congratulations, I’m sure.”

“Didn’t expect to see him in _here,_ I mean.” The crowd shifted a little again, and Farrier was sure of it then – he’d only known Collins a fortnight, and had only been able to recall his name for a week of that, but that was his golden head, alright, and his open, puppyish face.

“Thanks for the drink,” Farrier said, cutting off his companion in mid-sentence, and pushed himself off the wall to saunter across to the bar.

Collins was laughing a shade too loudly, as though he’d already had a couple. The men with him weren’t RAF; their edges were too blurred and their shoulders too soft.

“I’ll take another, Ron,” Farrier said across the bar, pushing his empty glass forward by way of a signal. “And whatever this chap here’s having.” He flicked a thumb in Collins’ direction; Collins still hadn’t spotted him.

“Gentleman here wants to buy you a drink,” Ronnie barked at Collins, and there was a great deal of whistling and cooing from the rabble around him.

Collins glanced down the bar and saw Farrier, and it took a while for his face to pale – the _couple_ must have been _several_. He looked as though someone had boxed his ears. Pushing his mates aside, he began a frantic gabble of excuses, half of which were lost in the din.

“Just – just – only came in here with – didn’t know it was – I didn’t – I’m not – sir, I promise I’m not -”

Farrier stopped him with a hand on his forearm.

“Collins,” he said slowly. Collins glanced upwards queasily. Farrier spread his hands out, shrugging slightly. “I’m here too, aren’t I?”

*

_1955_

They found a bench in an overgrown orangery away from the ballroom. The air was close and thick, and smelled of rot, and Farrier had been so blindsided he’d forgotten to avail himself of another coupe of champagne.

The late July dusk and the film of algae creeping across the glass panes of the orangery’s roof shadowed Collins’ face. Farrier wanted to pull him back into the light, to tilt his face up and stare into the ripples and folds and divots in the skin until each one could never be forgotten. He wanted to stare and to look away, to touch and not to touch.

His own hair was streaked with grey at the brows and the sides – relics of imprisonment, in Germany and in Hammersmith – but Collins’ was bright and full, still, and he kept pushing it out of his eyes distractedly – still.

“Didn’t know you’d be here,” Farrier said, stupidly.

“Didn’t know _you’d_ be, what with – all the –” Collins waved an abortive hand.

“You heard, then?”

Collins shrugged. “Hard not to. All over the papers, wasn’t it.”

Farrier said nothing, because what he wanted to say was too cruel and too selfish. 

“Bad luck, pal.” _Pal._ “S’bollocks. Think they’d have better things to do.”

“Apparently, the moral dignity of the nation is in grave peril, and examples must be made,” Farrier intoned drily.

“Wouldn’t be a fucking nation to _be_ in grave peril, without –”

Farrier waved a hand to shut him up. The belated, impersonal indignation was too painful, when what he wanted to say was _and you? Are_ you _disgusted? Or relieved you’ve not been caught yet? Or don’t you go in for that sort of thing any more? And if not, why not? Because you’ve straightened up and found a nice bird, a Florence or a Sheena, to lie back dutifully and think of England? Or because there isn’t a bloke who can look at you, you poor, poor bugger, without flinching?_

Instead, he said: “you’re here alone?”

In the watery gloom, he saw Collins grin. It might have been sly or bitter: it was certainly not a grin he’d had in his repertoire back in ’39. It looked an almighty effort, to move the knotted muscles of his face.

“Aye, all alone. Bit of a recurring theme, you could say.”

For a fraction of a second, Farrier imagined the other universe – where they’d be here in suits plucked that morning from their places nestled together in the closet, circulating through clusters of jewelled girls, with their twin smiles flirtatious and skin-deep, and their eyes meeting ever so often, a secret, invisible telegraph.

He cursed again the lack of champagne.

There were obvious questions. How they’d been. What they’d been up to. Where they’d been living, and with whom, and where the peace had taken them, and whether it had been all that victory had promised. A decade of polite and mindless detail, and Farrier knew if they started down that route, that would be the only one they’d tread. There would be nothing but _oh, I’m a buyer at Lewis’s_ or whatever else Collins had been filling his days with, and the way to the true stuff, the blood and the damage their souls had endured, would be closed again.

“Are you in much pain?” he asked, which was halfway between asinine conversation and baring his heart.

“Not much, these days. Comes and goes, you know. Twelve ops. Operations. Surgical operations, I mean – you know what I mean. Anyway. Still a face only a mother could love.”

 _You didn’t let me try,_ Farrier thought, and looked away. The air in the orangery was stifling; there was something musty under the sweet decay of mulch.

“You?”

“What?”

“Leg bother you much?”

Farrier glanced down at his left leg, and the cane propped against the bench next to it. “Ah.” The truth was it ached constantly, and kept him awake at nights, and made him feel old and decrepit and useless – but that was true of other parts of him, too. And the tone between them was set: they would be grimly comical, a light dusting of self-deprecation and a flourish of honourable forbearance, and nothing deeper, nothing truer.

“About the same as you. Never be quite right, but –” he jiggled his knee. “Holds up right enough.”

*

_1940_

Farrier had played at scrum-half at school, but they were short of players on the base, so he was generally roped in as hooker on the rare occasion they got a game going.

Their muscles were coiled and wasted, after the winter, and the first pale sun of April brought them out onto the paddock. The ground was still soft from a heavy rainfall, and was swiftly churned up beneath their boots. Farrier’s sides were streaked with dirt and grass-stains inside the first ten minutes, and his chest heaved sharply.

The mud and the cold spring afternoon felt glorious. Their bodies, loose and unencumbered by the tight walls of the cockpit. They shouted a lot, because they could, and because it was a joy to hear each other, clean and clear on the air, and not blistered with radio static.

At half-time he lurched over to the steps of the mess, a stitch in his side and his thighs smarting with the cold. Collins and Armitage were cross-legged with a mosaic of playing cards between them; they declined to acknowledge his presence. Farrier stood over them, watching Collins gnaw at the side of his thumb.

“That hand’s a joke, Armitage,” he said finally.

Collins squinted up at him.

“Get out of the light, Farrier,” he said mildly, his hand an ineffectual shade over his eyes. He’d not expressed a shred of interest in rugby in the months Farrier had known him.

Farrier put his hands on his hips. “Thought you two were meant to be fetching our refreshments.”

“We were,” Armitage drawled. “But then this bold-faced whippersnapper seduced me into a rather tasty round of gin rummy, and, well, here we are.” Collins was still looking upward, his features screwed up quite delightfully.

“Seduced?” Farrier let a smile fall into his voice. “I doubt it. Couldn’t seduce a deb, this one.”

“That’s no way to talk to your water-boy,” Collins said lightly. They both had a pass that weekend, and Farrier thought he might take Collins to the Regent. He wanted him constantly. It was getting to be a problem; it made his ribs ache. He wondered whether Collins knew – he’d been trying not to let on.

“I’ll talk to you whatever way I like, Pilot Officer,” Farrier said, and nudged Collins’ foot with the muddy tip of his boot before jogging back to the game. He felt Collins’ eyes on him all the way back, and threw himself around with rather more exuberance than usual, and felt only slightly foolish for it.

*

_1955_

“Do you hear from the others?” Collins asked. His fingers were idly shredding the drooping frond of some exotic shrub. They were remarkably dextrous, and still possessed of the same slenderness, despite the heavy scarring across the backs of his hands.

“Even less than I used to, since – ” he stopped. “Who’s left, anyway?” _Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall._

“Connors. Acker. Leigh Hibberd – no, I think he was after your time. The fellow with the Jack Russell – Henry something or other. Ponsonby?”

“I don’t hear from anyone very much,” Farrier said sharply, to stop his incessant listing. “Not sure I want to.”

Collins fell silent. The lads Farrier had known, the ones who’d come before Collins, and the ones who’d come after – they were mostly dead, and they’d mostly died while he was festering in Sagan.

“Wanted to hear from _you_ ,” Farrier continued, his teeth gritted. He couldn’t stop himself. “You could have – just a word or two. To say you were alright.”

And there they were. Arrived at the rub of it. Collins stood, abruptly.

“Yes, well. It wasn’t – things weren’t easy, back then. It wasn’t – it wasn’t simple.”

 _Yes, it was,_ Farrier wanted to say.

*

_1945_

The nurse who pointed him to the correct ward eyed his crutch dubiously, as though expecting him to collapse the minute her back was turned. He was still holding onto it out of sheer pig-headedness, he knew – the doctors at Northolt were adamant he’d have near full use of the leg, in time, if he’d only devote himself to their regime of ludicrous exercises.

The ward was long – a quiet bright place on the edge of the High Weald, a far cry from the screaming chaos of the first aid station on base. The perfect place to hide them away – the mangled faces, the ones whose sacrifice was gouged into their skins. Farrier saw ghouls pass, as he lurched down the ward.

Collins’ bed was near the end of the ward. Dying carnations in a mug, and a photograph of a woman Farrier remembered to be Collins’ mother.

The lumpy figure in the bed croaked something indistinguishable. He was a sorry sight, his entire head crusted with bandages, his eyes lashless and a brighter blue than Farrier had dared remember. One leg still elevated, both arms clumsy with plaster. A deathly, cloying stink of antiseptic lingered.

“Collins,” Farrier said, with a tenderness of which he’d forgotten he was capable. “Can you hear me? Collins, it’s me.”

Collins twitched his arm towards the visitor’s chair. He tried to speak, and mouthed silently for a moment. Farrier wanted to touch the raw and peeling lips, to run his fingers along the seam of his mouth until the skin was smooth and whole and full again.

“Staying?” Collins managed finally, as Farrier settled himself in the chair.

 _Forever,_ Farrier wanted to say, but his throat closed up momentarily, and he braced his hands on his knees and blinked furiously until he could see again.

“I – God, Collins. Do you know how good it is –”

“Sorry I couldn’t write,” Collins whispered, raising his arms fractionally. A shrug, or a plea for an embrace?

Farrier could manage only a wan smile. “Thought you might have gotten sick of me. Found yourself a –” It was a feeble joke, and there was no laughter in Collins’ eyes.

“No. No.” Though weak, it was emphatic, and broke Farrier’s heart a little.

“Must look a sight myself. They’ve been shovelling me full of this vile stuff. Yanks developed it – meant to be full of protein. Can’t keep the weight on, though. All skin and bones.”

He could peel his clothes away, right here, naked in full view of the ward: bare the hollows of his collarbones, and the notches of his spine, and finally the still-beating knot of his heart, and say _here. This was always yours._ Anything to stop himself from spilling these banalities. Show him the translucence of his skin and the twist in his knee that would never quite heal.

“S’good,” Collins rasped. “S’good to see you. Wanted – didn’t think we’d – Christ, Farrier, look at the state of me.”

Farrier wondered whether he’d ever be able to stop himself looking. The white cocoon, the sarcophagus between his hands and Collins’ skin. Crack it open – peel away the layers and then the dead flesh and the new and tender skin, and then the muscles, atrophied and shrivelled, until they were down to bone, until they were nothing but matter, scattered and pure.

“Look at me,” Collins said again, as angrily as his ruined voice would allow.

“I’m looking,” Farrier replied, and his voice dropped to a murmur without his realising it.

“How – I don’t – Farrier, I don’t expect you to – how could I ask that of anyone?”

Farrier leaned forwards in his chair. There were other visitors on the ward; gently weeping girlfriends and stoic fathers. “It’s not yours to ask,” he said, sotto voce.

Collins’ eyes flicked from Farrier to the ceiling. “Look at me,” he whispered again, desperately.

“I am,” Farrier said, slowly, filling it with the promises he’d failed to make back at the beginning of it all.

Two broken men, one old, his grizzled bones grotesquely set, the other with his youth all scorched away. Both grounded, both flightless. 

“How long – when were you liberated?” Collins’ tone was falsely bright, if muffled by gauze.

“Nearly a month. Took an age to demob us.” Farrier spared him the details – that he’d barely slept an hour a night since, that his fists were coiled constantly, more to stop them shaking than in preparation for a fight.

He’d gone off the rails in the Wingco’s office, prowling and promising murder if someone didn’t tell him where Collins was convalescing, and before he’d been able to tell what was happening he was clutching the edge of the desk, great dry sobs shaking his whole body. Two cadets had been called to grapple him into a chair and fetch him water – they’d looked at him as though he were mad, which he supposed he was.

“You came straight here?”

Farrier nodded. _Of course._ It had been his best fantasy, the long-awaited reunion. They were always alone, and usually naked, and Collins was young and beautiful, as he’d been in ’39, and nobody was trying to have a goddamn conversation about what had happened or what came next. It was always their bodies and their hearts, and nothing and no one else.

A far cry from this – Collins mangled beyond much recognition, held prisoner among starched women and sad-eyed priests. And Farrier, old and feral.

“Of course I came,” he said quietly, in case Collins didn’t yet understand.

“What about – didn’t – why?”

Farrier barked a laugh. Collins had always been a little dense.

“ _Why?_ God. Such a question. Nothing better to do with my freedom, I suppose. And – I suppose, because of Yeats.”

“Yeats?”

“Hmm. I forget the verse. How it goes _. The pilgrim soul in you_. You remember. Toby Fletcher-Jones was always quoting it. What was the rest?”

Collins quirked the corner of his mouth; the bandages shifted. “And loved –” he whispered. His voice was dry and cracked. “And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”

“That’s it,” Farrier said. “Your changing face.” He reached across and folded his fingers gingerly around Collins’ paw, swaddled in its bandage-mitten. It was just a stab of his imagination that he felt Collins’ fingers flutter slightly, beneath the plaster of Paris and the ruined flesh.

*

_1955_

“You could have written,” Farrier said again. “Just once. I’d have let it alone. All I wanted was to know things had gone okay for you.”

Collins had the decency to look him in the eye. “I should have. I felt – I feel horrid about it. The years passing made it harder to think of doing anything about it. Cowardice, I suppose. Couldn’t stand to know I’d disappointed you. Always did hate it when you got in a tiff with me.”

“When did I get in a tiff with you?” Farrier said, huffing a laugh of sheer incredulity.

“Oh, all the time. I’d hop out the cockpit and you’d be there on the apron, ready to tell me _this_ was wrong, and _that_ was foolish.” Farrier blinked. He’d never thought of himself as overly critical – of anyone save himself. He wondered whether Collins had been the only one who’d felt that way; or whether Collins had been the one who’d received the bulk of his censure, simply because Farrier was always so excessively aware of every one of Collins’ actions, inside and outside the cockpit.

“Well, I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I didn’t mean –”

“Heavens, Farrier, don’t _apologise,_ ” Collins said. “I was a fucking idiot, those first few weeks. I’d have bought it for sure without you there to lick me into shape.”

Farrier shrugged. The glass doors at the end of the orangery swung open and a couple burst in. The man – a short, stocky type with furious red hair – was without his jacket, and his face was sweaty. The girl was wearing a salmon-coloured gown which shimmered in the dusk, and clashed horribly with her beau’s hair. She was laughing and pulling him around by the arm.

“Oops, sorry,” she said without contrition when she saw the two of them huddled with their knees angled toward each other on the bench. “Didn’t see you!”

“Don’t mind us, miss,” Collins said breezily. “Just two old friends catching up.”

Farrier looked at him sharply. _Friends._ The word was almost painful in its inadequacy. Though there’d been a time it would have been an exaggeration.

*

_1939_

Collins fucked the way Farrier’d imagined he might, when he’d idly considered it, as he had from time to time. A little frantic and a little earnest, with small shallow gasps and his fingertips bruising Farrier’s upper arms.

He’d been so anxious to stop his eyes from widening, when Farrier had drained his pint and smacked his lips, and propositioned him brusquely, the third time they’d found themselves at the Sphinx of a weekend. So keen to banish the schoolboy side of him, to appear louche and worldly. The same cowed expression Farrier had seen on him in training lectures.

Farrier’d had word that morning that Corin Asquith, with whom he’d shared a set at Emmanuel, had been aboard the _Ark Royal_ when she was torpedoed in Scapa Flow, and had drowned trying to swim to shore. The news had left him restless, and irritatingly conscious of his own mortality. And Collins had been there, and interested, though he tried hard to hide it – and fucking him seemed a brighter prospect than brooding his way through the best part of a bottle of Ardbeg.

The teasing had been fun, or at least more fun than thinking about death. _The grave’s a fine and private place,_ Farrier had sing-songed, leaning back in his chair, and split a shark’s smile before the second half of the couplet, which Collins mouthed along with him, shaking his head in mock despair.

And here he was now, on his back, with Farrier speared above him. There was an open, rapt look on his youthful face. It dawned on Farrier, rather belatedly, that this might be the first time he’d done anything like this.

“First time buggering a fellow?” he asked, grinning down at him. Collins coloured furiously, his hair plastered to his forehead.

“Aren’t I doing – isn’t it –” he propped himself on his elbows, still gasping. Farrier gathered him up, his mouth in his sweaty hair, and growled faintly.

“Don’t see me complaining, do you,” he said, half into Collins’ mouth, and Collins beamed and fell back into the clammy tangle of sheets, pulling Farrier down with him.

*

_1955_

Farrier still desired him: that was the worst of it. It had been there since early in their acquaintance, and it was there still, insistent and wholly irrational, and chafing against the rage and betrayal of the past decade. He’d forgotten how Collins moved – the angular, artless grace of it. There was a cynicism to his manner now, a flinty gleam of sarcasm, but it could not entirely mask the sweet remnant of his sincerity.

A final shag might do it, he thought acidly. Drag him further into the shadows, push him against an ornamental palm until his back bled. A wound to be cauterised. Farrier wondered if Collins still made that absurd whimpering sound when he came, and whether it would still make his own heart leap.

“I’ve been alone, mostly,” he said blithely, apropos of nothing. Perhaps he meant to provoke guilt. Or to prove his loyalty – he wasn’t sure. “I’ve found it suits me. I suppose we’d have driven each other mad, in peacetime.”

Collins made a strangled noise at the back of his throat.

“The – what did the papers say? – my _indiscretion._ Scratching an itch. Nothing more. The same reason I was always down the Sphinx on a Saturday night.” God, he wanted some more champagne. He was almost entirely sober now, and this was a conversation better suited for six a.m. with the sun rising and bleary eyes and whiskeyed blood and the dawn chorus drowning out his embarrassment.

“I haven’t shared a bed with another person since – it was just after the Soviets lifted the blockade on Berlin. We didn’t leave the flat for four days. A Yank, would you believe. Died in Korea. That’s what I heard, anyway.”

Collins said, slowly, “Funny how we were meant to have ended all wars.”

“Yes, funny that.”

“Cheapens the sacrifice a bit, doesn’t it?”

Farrier was silent. Chuck had a chest full of hair and a mouth full of straight, white teeth, and he’d strutted around Farrier’s flat brazenly naked, in a way that unnerved and embarrassed Farrier to the point that he’d felt faintly relieved when they’d quit each other at Liverpool Street.

“I’ve been alone, too,” Collins said faintly. “There was – well, it wasn’t anything, really. We used to smile at each other on the train from time to time. And once I dropped my hat, and he picked it up. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

Farrier said nothing. They’d been each other’s confessors long after they’d been lovers. He still had Collins’ letters, stacked neatly in the footlocker on the floor of his wardrobe. He’d come close to burning them several times – usually when strong drink had been taken – but perhaps he’d kept them out of spite; so that one day he’d have something to brandish angrily in Collins’ face.

*

_1944_

Collins’ letters stopped two weeks before Christmas.

Farrier wrote three into the silence, the desperation in each more palpable than the last. As though the Stalag Luft provided insufficient fodder for self-torture – atop the cold and isolation and stasis, he now added horrific fantasies. Of Collins, dead, or of Collins, spending his evening pass with a pretty WAAF and a bag of dolly mixtures, of Collins, fallen out of love with him.

More than once he thought of writing to the Wingco for news. Perhaps certainty was better than not. The final flourish of bureaucracy, a safe and final DECEASED stamped across the envelope. Better than the horrors of his imagination, maybe. But in the end his cowardice overcame him.

England was frozen, for him. Everything in the place he had left it, like the poor fools of Pompeii, immortalised in their final, everyday undertakings. It was hard to think of his country growing old and war-weary without him. Time played tricks. Years were passing, imperceptibly.

Men came, and went, and some of their names stuck, and others did not. He kept what routines he could from freedom. Twenty minutes of calisthenics before breakfast, and another twenty before bed. He awoke early, though there was nothing to awake for. Military discipline died hard, and kept his mind from fraying further.

His body was little better; he’d broken his leg badly leaping from a moving truck eighteen months after his capture, as they’d been moving him to Sagan. It had been foolhardy, and rash, and he’d soon regretted it. He’d managed to limp a mere eighty yards into the forest, dragging the bad leg behind him, his breathing ragged and painful. It took no time at all for the guards to catch up with him, and they jostled the leg deliberately as they bundled him back into the truck. The convalescence had been long, and lonely, and marked by delirium – shot up with meperidine, he saw spectral visions of Collins often, and fell out of bed twice reaching for him.

It was cold, the winter that Collins stopped writing; the sort of cold to freeze the soul. There were still noble, abstract ideas to fight for, Farrier knew, dimly, yet they seemed dull and worthless without the promise of Collins’ arms around him. So easily he’d been derailed from service to King and country. Country was Collins, and the taste of his mouth in the morning, and the even pulse of his breathing over the radio.

It was New Year’s Eve when Farrier received word from another bloke in the squadron – to say that Collins had been shot down over northern France. _He’s a bit of a mess,_ Carmichael wrote, with infuriating imprecision. Not a word about the extent or nature of his injuries, or the location or progress of his recuperation.

Farrier tilted his face to the last night of 1944, watched his white breath escape to freedom, and hated himself for the small stab of relief he’d felt – not that Collins was alive, but that his silence had not been a sign of cooling passion.

*

_1955_

The band in the ballroom was slowing down – syrupy strings to replace the hiss of the hi-hat. The crowds on the dancefloor would be slowly clearing; women would have their cheeks pillowed against their boyfriends’ lapels as they swayed gently.

“Do you remember driving out to Tommy’s house?” he asked while the band began _Here in my Heart,_ sumptuous and sad.

“We spent New Year’s Eve there, didn’t we?”

“And most of New Year’s Day. You were too sick to move until midday.”

“It was that old bottle of damson gin Tommy found. My puke was purple the next day.”

Farrier glanced at him; he was laughing slightly, and he looked back at Farrier with his eyes melting into wistfulness. The skin of his face was glassy and taut, like a doll’s, but his eyes were the same eyes, bright and wide. Farrier wondered if they sat here together long enough, talking about long-ago parties thrown by dead men, whether the anger might eventually evaporate.

“Do you remember dancing?” Their knees were angled towards each other. It would be the work of a moment to stretch out his hand and curl his fingers around Collins’ thigh.

“I remember,” Collins said softly. “You were wearing a dreadful shirt – was it paisley? It was very loud, whatever it was.”

“It wasn’t mine. I think I found it thrown over a bannister.”

Collins laughed. “Probably. You were a terrible dancer. You kept getting your arms in a twist when you tried to twirl me about.”

“I’m a worse dancer now,” Farrier said, tapping his leg with his fingertips. He felt a sudden and long-dormant wave of affection towards Collins; it was warm and stifling, like a too-tight collar.

“Was that the night we fell asleep under the pool table?”

“I don’t remember,” Farrier said, though he did – he remembered the scratch of the carpet beneath their backs and the strange sensation – almost of immurement – of being surrounded by dark, thick wood, and he remembered Collins’ drunken groaning, how he flopped about restlessly, pulling Farrier’s greatcoat, which they had been using as an inadequate blanket, closer around him, leaving Farrier awake and shivering.

“I remember you wedged me in the back of the Hillman. You kept turning round to check I hadn’t blown chunks all over the back seat. I thought you were going to veer off the road.”

“It was perfectly safe.”

Somehow their knees were touching now, though Farrier hadn’t moved, and hadn’t noticed Collins do so either. What could this touch say, after ten years? What sort of silent stories might pass along this conduit?

“You always were good at looking after me,” Collins said, and Farrier thought _yes. I was. I wanted to do it forever._

_*_

_1940_

Farrier squinted at his reflection in the mildewed mirror, braced himself, and lathered up his brush.

Shaving was an unpleasant experience. The floors of the shower block were bare concrete, there was only one bare bulb to light the place, and Farrier was invariably – as on this occasion – trying to get the job done on thirty-six hours without sleep.

He was halfway done when Collins poked his head around the door.

“Evening,” he said a shade too brightly.

Farrier nodded curtly in acknowledgement. Collins ambled over and leaned against the sink next to Farrier’s. He reeked of oil.

“They patched her up okay for you, then?” Collins had limped back to base that afternoon with smoke pouring ominously from his engine, leaving Farrier to pick off the two remaining bandits.

Collins hummed in confirmation. “Dicey, wasn’t it? Bit of a close shave.” Farrier raised his eyebrow and caught Collins’ eye in the mirror. “Pun not intended. Just meant – thanks, anyway. Good to know you’ve got my back.”

He was jabbering; the words bubbled out of him, helter skelter. _High as a fucking kite,_ Farrier thought.

“You want to watch it,” Farrier said, tilting his head to get at the underside of his jaw. “Take it easy.”

“I know, I know,” Collins said. “Too much wakey-wakey. Feel like my brain’s vibrating, sometimes.” He rubbed a hand over his face.

Farrier finished shaving in silence, acutely aware of Collins fidgeting next to him, and of the fact that he himself was wearing nothing but a singlet and shorts, and of how easy it would be to wrestle Collins into a stall and let him feel the smoothness of a newly-shaved cheek between his thighs.

They were careful on base, however. In truth, they had very little to do with one another, in the spaces between ops and weekends, which were at any rate the only things that mattered any more. The only markers of time – fucking or killing, drinking or surviving. The grey area between might have been too much like friendship, or – God help him – romance. This was an odd conversation, a not wholly welcome break from their routine.

Collins was wired; his eyes were red and twitchy. Farrier winced as he splashed cold water on his face, and scrubbed hard with the towel to get some feeling back into his cheeks.

He turned to Collins and raised his hand to grip his chin tight enough to hurt. Collins’ hazy eyes widened. “I’m telling you,” Farrier said sternly, instead of crowding Collins against the mirror and sticking his tongue in his mouth. “Collins. Go easy on the Benzedrine. I mean it.”

Collins shrugged. “If you say so.” He pushed off the sink and stared at Farrier for a few burning seconds, before leaving.

*

_1955_

Their knees were touching, as though smelted together, and Collins’ hands were curled loosely in his lap, full of promise. Farrier could faintly recall how hesitant his hands could be, on his body, and how sure and deft they were, on the yoke.

“Are you going back to the city tonight?” Collins murmured, so quietly Farrier had to lean closer. The forest was alive around them; maybe if they stayed here long enough the branches would bend around their limbs. Maybe they would themselves grow roots, and bear fruit.

Farrier kept his eyes fixed on his lap, and his damaged leg. “I should find Terrence soon,” he said, similarly hushed. “He said he’d order me a car. The last train’s – I forget when. Soon, I think.”

“He’s said I can have a room upstairs,” Collins said.

“Oh,” Farrier said, as though they were having an ordinary, mundane conversation.

“Yes, we’ve kept in regular touch since the war. He’s been very good to me.”

“Yes.”

“The war never seemed to touch him, did it? He never seemed to get any less human.”

“There must be those who are incorruptible, still.”

Collins took Farrier’s hand softly in his own. Farrier’s fingers curled involuntarily around Collins’.

“I wish you’d stay with me,” Collins whispered.

Sounds of joy filtered into their glass cage – final toasts and farewells. Farrier felt as though something large was pressing on his chest. It was difficult to breathe.

“I – can’t,” he choked finally.

Collins said his Christian name under his breath, his thumb moving slowly over the ball of Farrier’s palm. “You can.”

Farrier drew his hand back. “I can’t forgive you.” He straightened up; his spine still clicked to attention after years of civilian life. Curtly, he said, “I’ve tried, and I can’t.”

*

_1946_

He arrived for morning visitation on a Thursday in March, armed with a trio of small and underripe bananas for which he’d paid a pockmarked seaman far too much. His wallet was full of newspaper clippings – rooms above a shop in Clapham, a flat in Elephant and Castle, affordable and discreet, the name of a plastic surgeon on Harley Street, a confetti of hopes and futures.

They had their routines now. Farrier would catch the 8.03 from Charing Cross, and then sit on the bus across from Tunbridge Wells, trying to make his leg sit still. The conductress knew him by now, and refused to meet his eye when she clipped his ticket. He’d be at the Vic in time for visitation at eleven hundred hours, and the matron would frown slightly at him before harrumphing quietly and letting him onto the ward.

Collins was improving, minutely. He was unbandaged, now, and walking, after a fashion. He was on his sixth surgery, and tetchy about it. He’d taken to asking Farrier for a mirror, too.

“What does it matter?” Farrier had said, carelessly, at their last meeting. They’d been in the grounds, Farrier wheeling Collins along the gravel, and Collins had been complaining. He tutted through his teeth at Farrier’s answer.

“M’not a _child,_ Farrier,” he’d said. “I can fucking take it. S’not going to be pretty, I know. I can _take_ it.”

Farrier had stopped momentarily to tuck the blanket more firmly around Collins’ legs, and Collins had batted his hand away irritably with his own, and snapped at him so badly that the visit had come to an end in a cloud of muted acrimony soon after. It had left Farrier feeling rotten the whole week – he’d spent the time torturing himself with what he _should_ have done, which was to wheel Collins further into the grounds, behind the broad trunk of the monkey puzzle, and kiss him tenderly on every inch of his raw and healing face, and say _see. I don’t care._

“Oh, Mr Farrier,” the matron said, as he approached, in place of her usual scowl.

“Matron.”

“Did you – excuse me – has there been some sort of –”

Farrier paused. “No,” he said patiently. “No mistake. I’m here – here to see Flight Lieutenant Collins, as usual. If you wouldn’t mind –”

“Well, that’s just it, Mr Farrier,” the matron said. Her face looked kinder than he’d ever seen it. “Mr Collins discharged himself three days ago. I rather thought he’d have let you know. Seeing as how –”

“Three days ago?”

“That’s right. Dr McIndoe advised against it, but – well, you know Mr Collins. Stubborn as the day is long.”

“You _let_ him go?” Farrier swallowed hard to suppress the electric note of panic in his voice.

“We couldn’t very well stop him, could we? Now Mr Farrier, I wish I could be of more assistance, but I have patients to see to.”

“He didn’t say – did he leave a forwarding address?”

“Not that I recall. Good day, Mr Farrier.”

She left Farrier standing alone on the linoleum, numb, still clutching the wretched, overpriced bananas. He could see Collins’ bed now, at the far end of the ward, pristine and flat, the photographs cleared from the bedside table.

There was nothing to be done, and after standing mutely on the spot for what could have been hours – in which time two nurses and an orderly approached him on separate occasions to ask gingerly if there was anything they could do – he walked back to the bus stop, the tide of grief and rage already rising.

*

_1955_

“You just –” Farrier stopped. He’d been waiting to say it for a decade. Everything he’d ever said to Collins had come out wrong, somehow. “I thought we were going to build a life; I thought we’d decided. And – and you just _left,”_ he said lamely. He didn’t recognise the plaintive note in his own voice.

Collins had the decency to duck his head. He was standing now, and night had fallen completely, leaving him silhouetted among the ferns. His scarred face was obscured, and with a hip cocked and a cigarette at his lip he might have been twenty-two again, whole and brave and achingly naïve, yearning to become heroic.

“You left,” Farrier said again – it was less accusatory, this time.

“I had to,” Collins said.

“Don’t talk rot. They were looking after you. You jeopardised your recovery.”

“I _had_ to – you – I didn’t want you to –”

“If you didn’t want me around, you’d only to say.”

Collins’ head whipped up sharply.

“It wasn’t – _Christ,_ Farrier. It wasn’t – I wanted to tell you. Never been much of a one with – this stuff, you know.”

“Ten years, you bastard. You’ve had long enough to work out what to say.”

Collins shifted his weight on his feet. He looked smaller now – whatever echo had remained of the boy of ’39 had dissipated once more.

Without looking at Farrier, he took a deep breath and said, “I couldn’t stand feeling – well, look at me. Didn’t feel much like a man when I was sobbing for my bloody mother. Couldn’t stand the dreams, couldn’t stand being awake. It was – God, it was unbearable. I don’t think I ever told you – I thought about – God, I was a mess. Still am, truth be told. You didn’t need that. You were better off.”

 _Without me._ The words hung unsaid. Farrier felt sick.

“Wasn’t for you to say,” he managed.

“Yes, it was. I told you – I didn’t want to ask it of you.”

“You mean, you didn’t want to need anyone?”

“No. Least of all you. I couldn’t stand to have you pity me.”

Farrier stood up too suddenly; his knee wrenched painfully. “When did I ever pity you?” he snarled. “You were too damned busy pitying yourself to pay attention, anyway.”

Collins stared. He opened his mouth, but said nothing. His shoulders looked crumpled. The fag was down to the filter.

The grief returned; it had been like a bereavement, walking into that ward and finding Collins gone. The same feeling – a beast howling deep inside him. A constant ache in his jaw from clenching it. The cruelty of forgetting about it, momentarily, only to remember again, minutes later, and have the pain return, a bizarre and pitiless Promethean trap. And here was the deity back to mock him.

Finally, he said, his mouth dry and sour, unable to look Collins in the face, “I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you that _I_ needed _you.”_

*

_1940_

The revelation was late in arriving. It was mid-May, days after German tanks crossed the Meuse. The continent was crumbling. All leave was cancelled, and the scramble bell tore through the base almost hourly. The end was approaching.

There was little conversation in the dispersal hut; every last scrap of energy salvaged for the sorties. Men wrote letters, or played languorous, disengaged hands of cards, or picked idly at their teeth. Farrier propped himself on a crate by the brazier – it was still cold, even in late spring – and watched Collins sleeping, ungainly huddled, on a rickety and uncomfortable folding chair.

There was something in him that recalled Jacob Kingsley-Moore. It might have been the slump of his head on his chest, or the guileless sprawl of his limbs. Kingsley-Moore, the first boy he’d ever loved, with his pale and pointed face and shock of black hair, whose anxious mother was forever hauling him out of school to see specialists in Switzerland.

He taught Farrier chess, badly, and occasionally would let Farrier talk him into skiving off cross country to poke around for frogs and newts at the edge of the lake. Eventually it turned out his mother’s anxiety had been justified, because he died of some rare blood cancer in the summer before they went into the Upper Fourth. Farrier found out the same way as everyone else, on the first day of September, cross-legged on the herringboned floor of the school hall, listening to the Headmaster calling Jacob _Jake._

Farrier watched Collins fidget and fold his arms – even asleep, he was twitchy. There was a permanent frown of worry beginning across his brow. The puppyish softness of his face was long gone, replaced by deep black circles under his eyes and a pinched, hollow look about his mouth.

 _So wise so young,_ Farrier thought. The words appeared from nowhere. A quirk of his memory, dredged up from school, probably. He’d likely been sitting next to Jacob when he’d first read the words. _Do never live long._ Collins shifted slightly in his seat.

He looked young and old at once, a universe flashing across his face. It dawned on Farrier, gently and without fanfare, that Collins reminded him of Kingsley-Moore because Farrier was in love with Collins, just as he had been with Kingsley-Moore. It was both a revelation, and not. The simplicity of it was breathtaking: he was a man in love, both terrified and comforted by it, in the middle of a war that was almost lost. He wondered how Collins felt, and how on earth he might go about asking him, and whether he should.

The brazier spat sparks, and Farrier jumped. The scramble bell screeched into action again. Collins stirred mulishly, rubbing his eyes.

“Time to go?” he asked, his voice scratchy.

 _I love you,_ Farrier thought stupidly, just to test out the words. He nodded. “Be careful. Keep your eyes peeled up there.”

Collins slipped his Mae West over his head with leaden arms and smiled sleepily at him across the hut. Farrier had a mad urge to wrestle him to the ground, to tie him down, to do something – _anything_ – to save him from danger. Yes, this was love sure enough – irresponsible and selfish and fucking inconvenient.  

*

_1955_

“You didn’t need me,” Collins said harshly. “You never did.”

“How would you know what I did and didn’t need?”

They were face to face now, and breathing heavily. Collins ground the end of his cigarette into the flagstones beneath their feet, and looked back up into Farrier’s face. “I don’t want a fight,” he said. “I’m sorry for the way I left, but I’m not sorry for leaving. You didn’t deserve to be saddled with me, and I _know_ you – you’re too noble for your own good.”

Farrier swallowed. “You don’t understand. How could you not know? I wanted - hell, a life with you. It’s all I wanted. I wanted it before Dunkirk, and I wanted it every day in the clink, and I still wanted it when I saw you all fried up.”

Collins looked stricken. “I don’t – Farrier, I don’t understand. It wasn’t – I thought we – I didn’t need you to love me back. It was enough – before – before Dunkirk, I was happy with it. Just the odd night – just that. I didn’t need you to be anything more to me.”

“Collins, I –” Farrier stopped. He felt drunk again, suddenly, though by now he hadn’t touched a drop for several hours. He pinched the bridge of his nose and felt his mind clear. “I loved you. You must have known. My letters –”

“Your letters?”

“I’ve never – surely you must have seen – I know we had to be careful, and measured. But you must have seen how much –”

“You _loved_ me?” Collins said faintly. He looked impossibly young in the moonlight trickling through the glass.

Farrier nodded curtly. He’d not spoken like this before in his entire life, or for so long, and it made him queasy. “Yes. And I needed you. The prison was bearable as long as – it’s why I went mad, the last six months inside. After you – when your letters stopped – it was the worst – the darkest period of my life.” He stopped again, and tried to stop his chest from heaving uncontrollably. “Don’t tell me what I needed, Collins. I won’t have it.”

The conversation was a decade overdue – longer – and the night was slipping away. Cars crunched on the gravel outside as guests began to leave. It felt like the worst days of the war again, like impending defeat, like the world was ending.

“I have to go,” Farrier said.

“I don’t want you to.” That was Collins of old, the Collins who would grab at Farrier’s arm as he slipped out of bed and make silly whining noises into the pillow until Farrier relented and dove back under the blankets.

“Collins,” Farrier said softly, and then his Christian name, softer still.

“I want to – you can’t leave it like this.”

Farrier’s leg was throbbing; he gave in and put his weight on the cane. Old, old, old. And unwanted, except by this damaged man. The war was still taking from him; it had taken everything, and now it took more. Hunting for peace, for ten years, and nothing to show for it but an old bundle of letters and a knot of hate inside his heart.

“Let me – please, let me –” Collins said, his hand clutching at Farrier’s lapel. Farrier felt his body sway involuntarily. “We could –”

The talking made him sick, and the still-continuing cancer of the war made him want to punch something, and Collins was standing before him, shame-faced and hopeful and full of life once more. His own bitterness would keep thwarting him, if he let it. 

“Tomorrow,” Farrier said hastily, before the old anger got the better of him. “There’s a tearoom in St Pancras. Say, midday.”

Collins’ fingers tightened in his suit. “We’ll talk?”

“Yes.” 

“And start again?” Collins asked, his lopsided face aglow in the dusk.

Farrier reached up to disentangle Collins’ fingers gently. “Yes,” he said, against the shell of Collins’ ear; it was as close to a promise as he could afford.  


End file.
